Japanese pioneer Hebraist Takamitsu Muraoka died last week in Leiden, the Netherlands, at age 88, after suffering a stroke a few weeks earlier and never fully recovering.

A specialist in Semitic languages and biblical Hebrew, Muraoka was proud to describe himself as the first Japanese student to complete a doctorate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, according to Steven Fassberg, the Caspar Levias Professor of Ancient Semitic Languages at the Hebrew University’s Department of Hebrew Language, who knew Muraoka since the early 1990s.

The Japanese scholar, he added, advanced the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls from a linguistic perspective and remained connected to Israel and in close contact with Israeli scholars for the rest of his life, even as he moved across the world to pursue his academic career, teaching at Manchester University in the United Kingdom, at Melbourne University in Australia, and finally at Leiden University, until he retired some 20 years ago.

“[Muraoka] did a doctorate with [prominent Semitic Languages Professor] Chaim Rabin, which was published years later as a book called ‘Emphatic words and structures in Biblical Hebrew,’” Fassberg told The Times of Israel over the telephone. “While he was doing his doctoral work, he took courses with all the greats at the university at the time.”

Fassberg explained that although Muraoka’s thesis was on biblical Hebrew, he also became an expert in Aramaic. By the end of his career, he knew several ancient and modern languages.

“He was a polyglot,” Fassberg said. “His English was impeccable. His Hebrew was excellent. He knew French and German. When he went to the Netherlands, he learned Dutch so he could lecture in Dutch. And, of course, he knew the ancient languages, Greek, Aramaic, Ugaritic… He was a very, very impressive scholar.”

Both during his active career and after he retired, Muraoka remained a prolific researcher, publishing dozens of academic works.

“He updated a grammar of biblical Hebrew that had been written in French in 1923, translated it into English, and it has become a classic since it appeared in the 1990s,” Fassberg said. “He was very interested in Septuagint studies, and he published a grammar of Aramaic in the Dead Sea Scrolls and wrote a syntax of the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

According to Fassberg, Muraoka was instrumental in promoting the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls – a collection of approximately 1,000 biblical and non-biblical scrolls dating between the 3rd century BCE and 1st century CE – from a linguistic perspective in the early 1990s. That’s also how they met.

“He had recently moved to Leiden from Melbourne, and he had two graduate students, one working on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and one on the book of Ben Sira,” he said, referring to the 2nd century BCE Hebrew work known as wisdom literature that is part of the Catholic biblical canon (but not of the Jewish or Protestant ones).

“He organized an international conference on the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls and in Ben Sira, and invited several people, and I was lucky enough to be one of them,” he added.

In the following years, several additional conferences on the topic were organized in different universities across the world.

“These conferences and this renewed interest in studying the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls and of Ben Sira, were all due to him because up until then, the Dead Sea Scrolls, of course, had been studied intensely and extensively, but people hadn’t really been all that interested in the language,” Fassberg said. “Some scholars were interested, but Muraoka really wanted to stress the language of the scrolls and encourage the study of the language, and he was very successful in doing so.”

The Japanese expert maintained close ties with Israel and Israeli academics.

“He was very much concerned about what was happening in Israel,” Fassberg recalled. “I remember emails [on the topic] all the way back to the assassination of Rabin [in 1995]. After Rabin was assassinated, he wrote to me that he had heard that [Rabin] had a song written on a piece of paper in his pocket when he was assassinated, and he wanted to know what the song was. In a later email, he asked me about certain words in the song. He knew modern Hebrew very well. He even published in modern Hebrew and translated at least one story by [Israeli writer Shai] Agnon into Japanese.”

Muraoka was in touch with Fassberg also in the weeks after the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, to inquire about his well-being and his family.

“He was upset and concerned,” Fassberg recalled.

They last exchanged emails about a year ago.

Muraoka was also a devout Christian, although according to Fassberg, this never influenced his academic work.

“He was a believer, but you would never know it from reading any of his academic work,” he noted.

After he retired, Muraoka often traveled to the Far East to teach biblical Hebrew in Christian seminaries, especially in countries where occupying Japanese forces committed atrocities during the Second World War.

“He was terribly upset and embarrassed by the Japanese occupation, and this was his way of atoning for it,” Fassberg said.

Although Muraoka was born in Hiroshima in 1938, just a few years before the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city at the end of the war in 1945, he never shared publicly what happened to him or his family during that period, as far as Fassberg knows.

On a personal level, according to the Israeli professor, Muraoka was reserved but always available to his colleagues.

“He was wonderful, always extremely helpful,” Fassberg said. “If you crack the outer veneer, he had a sense of humor.”

“He will be missed,” he added.

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